Is the Pentagon Hiding Flying Saucers and Aliens From Us?

Where is everybody?

This question was famously asked by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.

He and a couple of colleagues were having a lunchtime conversation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico about UFOs and aliens.  There are 250 billion or so stars in our galaxy, each possibly having planets. With that many potential planets, why aren't we inundated with aliens?

So where is everybody?

Dr. Fermi's lunchtime observation anticipates an important cosmological equation which was written by Frank Drake some 11 years later.   Dr. Drake's reasoning in 1961 led him to document what is now eponymously known as the Drake Equation. 

(Ed. note - I have always wanted to gratuitously use the word eponymously in a sentence.)

The Drake Equation (see appendix) calculates the probable number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.  And if you plug in some reasonable guesses for inputs into the equation, it tells you there is probably life out there somewhere.  Between 1,000 and 100,000,000 civilizations, according to Drake's original estimates.

A more recent statistically-based estimate using the Drake Equation suggests there are 4590 advanced civilizations in our galaxy.  Despite the absolutely ridiculous precision implied in such a statement, 4590 civilizations seems like a reasonable number.   We will assume that it is the correct number for illustration purposes in this blog post.

So, where is everybody?

The Vast Expanse

There is really no way that any of us can conceptualize the vastness of space.  

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years across. 

That is a long distance.

Even the nearest star system to earth, other than the sun (Alpha Centauri), is located a very long way from here... 4.3 light years away. 

How far exactly is 4.3 light years?

A light year is 5,800,000,000,000 miles.  Do the math.  24,940,000,000,000 miles.  24.9 quadrillion miles to the nearest star.  There is no way a human can even conceptualize that kind of distance.

Well, the aliens have spaceships.  They go pretty fast.

OK.  But even aliens can't exceed the speed of light.  And the closer you get to the speed of light, more energy is needed to further accelerate.  Much, much more energy.  Practically speaking, this energy limitation severely limits the speed of a spaceship.  

With very advanced technology, our aliens might be able to accelerate half way to Earth to (say) 1/10 the speed of light and then decelerate during the second half of the journey.  Average speed?  Let's call it ~ 1/20 the speed of light.  Duration of the trip from Alpha Centauri?  86 years.

My mom just turned 86.  Assuming my mom was an alien, she would have to have been born on the launch pad and she'd just be getting to Earth now, as a senior citizen... er... alien.  

However, there is a problem with this scenario.  The overwhelming majority of star systems are not inhabited by advanced civilizations.  

In fact, if you accept the above assumption of 4590 advanced civilizations occurring in the Milky Way, then there is only about two chances in a million of finding such a civilization in any single star system. Including the star systems that are nearby, such as Alpha Centauri.

The odds are definitely against us finding alien life in any of the star systems that are relatively near to Earth.  Therefore, our aliens are almost certainly going to have to travel vast, vast distances to reach Earth (assuming that is where they want to go).

Visiting Earth

That brings to mind yet another problem.  Imagine you are the alien and want to visit Earth.  What would cause you to pick out our solar system among the other 250,000,000 potential ones out there?

Well, earth has radio and TV signals!  And we aliens just tuned in to an episode of the Little Rascals!  So let's go there to meet these people!

But... man-made radio and TV signals started emanating from earth only about 100 years ago.  So these signals have only propagated out to a distance of 100 light years (electro-magnetic radiation travels at the speed of light in a vacuum).

And if you do a little more math starting again with the Drake Equation (see reference), you'll find that, on average these civilizations are 28,945 light years apart on average.  So those aliens are in for quite a wait if they want to tune into the Little Rascals, even if they are using their ultra-advanced 18 dimensional TV in the upside-down floating living room.  

As a comparison, modern humans have only existed for 10,000 years or so (roughly when we started farming and transitioned from hunter-gatherers to townspeople). When the aliens tune in to Earth, they are seeing and hearing... absolutely nothing... from 28,945 years ago. Cave people didn't send radio or TV signals.

Even a very strong telescope that the aliens invented would probably not see much in the way of a civilized society.  This is because, just like the radio waves, it will also take the light waves 28,945 years to cross that hypothetical distance, and cave people would not have exhibited any kind of signal, visible from space, indicating that they even existed.

Therefore, there is absolutely nothing that would make our hypothetical aliens choose Earth out of all the other 250,000,000 star systems in the galaxy.

Oh and even if they did launch a spaceship towards Earth, they would have to figure out how to last in deep space for 578,900 years.  And as a comparison, that is almost 3X longer than humans have been Homo sapiens (Humans evolved from Homo heidelbergensis about 200,000 years ago).

Highly, highly, highly unlikely.

Does that mean I don't believe in aliens?  Hell yes I believe in aliens!  I am absolutely certain they are out there.  Somewhere in our own Milky Way galaxy.  Further, if you include the other 200,000,000,000 galaxies found by the Hubble Space Telescope, there are probably on the order of 918,000,000,000,000 civilizations out there.  And that is probably a conservative estimate.  

So they are out there,  But the vastness of space argues strongly that each of these 918 trillion civilizations are almost completely isolated from each other.  And from us.

Weighing the Evidence

The Pentagon is supposedly going to release more evidence soon that aliens exist.  And there are all these anecdotal accounts of people being abducted by aliens.  It's on Netflix.  It's on podcasts.  Real people are shown that have real accounts of this.

And I am absolutely willing to listen and deeply consider every scrap of evidence that comes across my YouTube.

But here is the point.  The evidence that aliens have visited Earth has to be extraordinarily strong in order to overcome the extreme unlikelihood that they have 1) selected Earth to visit out of that vast sea of 1/4 of a trillion potential solar systems and 2) have successfully transited the vast, vast distances of interstellar space.

100% of all the accounts I've seen so far fail to meet that criteria.  Even highly unlikely terrestrial explanations for a particular phenomenon or sighting are far more likely than aliens visiting Earth.  Like this explanation for the recently released Navy videos of supposedly alien spaceships.

And further, if evidence for an alien visit really did turn up, you'd see it in multiple places - including peer-reviewed technical journals written by credible scientists.

Oh one more thing.  Please hold back any non-falsifiable hypotheses.  Like government agencies keeping all this stuff secret so they can use it against us.  Or that the aliens have invented an undetectable wormhole to get through space.  (The underlined words in these hypotheses make them impossible to falsify and so they should not even be part of our conversation.)

And in the future, I really will be watching for aliens right along with you.

I'll be watching later this week when the Pentagon releases more of the secret stuff they have been keeping under wraps.  

And, as my buddy and astrophysicist Larry Marschall has said, I won't believe it until I've actually met the alien pilot that brought them here.

Appendix


Where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

And:

R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space[5][6]

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